Transactional stuff to blow by in a hurry: response to Hot and Bothered was "cliché title" [duh] "Bravo!" [thanks] "I'm not sure what genre this piece falls under: it's too long for a review, but it's not quite a personal essay" [uh, where I come from the genre label is usually Social Documentary-- but the buzzwords for photography, literature, and rhetoric are all different]. Not a mark on the pages themselves, except near the title, and a concluding paragraph which doesn't give me any ideas for revision. I'll just let it sit for a while, I'm sure I'll find something else wrong with it soon. I went to an STC [Society of Technical Communicators] meeting tonight. It was fun; I knew a few people from school, and it wasn't nearly as stuffy as I feared.
But on to more interesting stuff. I'm way behind on my quota of notes for schoolwork, and I've got too much reading to do tonight to comment at great length, but I really should note another must read for me: Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling by S.K. Langer, 1967. It's referenced in an article I'm reading, "Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing" by J.N. Britton [more comment to come later]. Britton remarks, regarding Langer, that:
From her exploration of the laws governing a work of art she makes one very interesting suggestion: that in all works of art there is a building-up and resolution of tensions and that the intricate pattern of these movements, this rhythm, somehow reflects the "shape of every living act."
Makes art sound like sex, doesn't it? Well, that's a model that's always worked for me. Britton presses further on a different road though, proposing that:
We give and find shape in the very act of perception, we give and find further shape as we talk, write or otherwise represent our experiences. I say "give" and "find" because clearly there is order and pattern in the natural world irrespective of our perceiving and representing it.
Another article pegged Britton as a Platonist, as I recall. But aside from the philosophical spin, I'm quite attracted to his view of the impulse to represent our experiences. Skipping a boring bit about the difference between man and animal, Britton continues:
When, however, he shapes his experience into a verbal object, an art form, in order to communicate it and to realize it more fully himself, he is seeking to recapture a natural order that his daily actions have forfeited.
Now that's an interesting spin on what the writing, and the art-making process is all about.
Speaking of the perspective of fallen man, it's time for me to fall into Paradise Lost books 1&2.
